In April 1982 I took over from Clive James as the Observer's television critic. I anticipated a cosy period of acclimatisation: a new American soap called Dynasty was soon to start, followed by the year's main event, the stirring quasi-warfare of the World Cup in Spain. Instead, at coffee time on the Monday morning of my second week, ITV brought us the real thing live: the departure of a British military force to recapture a piece of colonial territory 8,000 miles away. The day was calm and blue at Portsmouth; two aircraft carriers towered over the waterside houses as tugs chivvied them out to sea; farewelling sailors lined the ships' edges; all was done with Royal Tournament precision. Then the fleet steamed off into misty long-shot, while the helicopters strapped to the decks shrank to polished beetles. It looked rather good on television, this war that would doubtless be called off before the equator was reached.

Little did we guess that these were the last sunny, honest, unspun images we were likely to get for some time; or that the Falklands war would turn out to be the worst-reported war since the Crimean. While our armed forces defeated the Argentinians, the Ministry of Defence was putting to rout the British media. All the significant news, good or bad, was announced or leaked from London. Reporters in the south Atlantic had the sour experience of hearing "their" news being broken for them on the World Service. Reports were censored, delayed, occasionally lost, and at best sent back by the swiftest carrier-turtle the Royal Navy could find. When relations between the press and the navy on board the Hermes were at their worst, Michael Nicholson of ITN and Peter Archer of the Press Association prefaced their bulletins with the rider that they were being censored. This fact was itself cen sored.

In the age of image, the Falklands war remained image-free for much of its length - no British pictures for 54 of the 74 days the conflict lasted - and image-weak thereafter. Don McCullin, our greatest living war photographer, was refused accreditation (so was Roddy Llewellyn, no doubt for different reasons). While the task force was at sea, there was only "radiovision": the voices of Brian Hanrahan and Michael Nicholson embellished by stills. And when the action on land began, the images were limited and controlled. Official factoids were grudgingly provided by the Ministry of Defence spokesman Ian McDonald, a man with the delivery and charisma of a speak-your-weight machine.

So the war, instead of being experienced back home as a continuous narrative, was a succession of jump-cuts, of sporadic sound- and vision-bites. The words that endure: Gotcha, Yomp, Rejoice, I Counted Them All Out and I Counted Them All Back. The still pictures: a library shot of the Belgrano, a yomping marine with a Union Jack attached to his radio aerial, the camouflaged face of Max Hastings, the reconstructed face of Simon Weston. The vision-bites: departure of the fleet, Harriers leaving the deck, the Sheffield ablaze, helicopters at Bluff Cove blowing liferafts to the shore with their rotors, burial of the dead at Goose Green, Argentinian prisoners with P&O cruise labels around their necks. Nor did these sequences always come in the correct order. If bad news couldn't be hidden, it was certainly repositioned: thus the estimate of casualties at Bluff Cove was covered by heartening shots of the QE2 returning home.

Given this vacuum, and the trifling official opposition to the war (Michael Foot, "inveterate peacemonger", in his self-applauding phrase, led a traditionally bellicose Labour party), a head of toxic jingoism built up. Driving round Nottinghamshire at the time, I was amazed that such a high proportion of the population owned Union Jacks. The bull frog tendency of the Tory party was in full croak. In pubs, it was wise to avoid discussion with learned readers of the Sun. It is still a surprise that the newspaper actually withdrew that Gotcha headline. Later editions led with the much more caring and concerned question: "Did 1200 Argies Drown?"

Every so often, you would shake your head and think that it couldn't, at this late stage of the 20th century, be happening like this. Or at least not for this reason: perhaps it was all about mineral reserves of incalculable wealth in the Antarctic, which we would lose unless we retained the Falklands? But no, it really was as simple as Borges said it was: two bald men fighting over a comb. Moralising aggression was the dominant public tone, and Brian Hitchen, editor of the Daily Star, was probably right when he said: "Most people would have been pig-sick if there hadn't been a fight." And for once, no one could stop us. This wasn't one of those measly pinko UN combined-ops; it wasn't putting down Commie insurgents; this time, the Yanks damn well couldn't tell us to stop. It was one-on-one, us-and-them, everyone else out of the ring or off the pitch. And when the referee - Alexander Haig, as it happened - tried to blow the whistle, nobody took any notice. After all, what had been happening domestically for the last couple of decades - a slow downward drift, squabbles with Europe, lack of respect out there? Well, we'd learn them respect. This was our war, and we were jolly well going to have it.

The fact that the rest of the world viewed the war as a bizarre and brainless squabble between nostalgic imperialism and nostalgic fascism was irrelevant; we didn't care what the rest of the world thought, except to imagine that it was impressed. ("What did you make of that war?" I asked a Swiss friend recently. He paused, frowned, and went into maximum-politeness mode. "I thought it was . . . ridiculous," he replied.) The fact that we'd been trying for decades to offload the islands, with the ardent Thatcherite Nicholas Ridley presenting a leaseback solution to the House of Commons only two years previously, was forgotten. The fact that we'd traded with the junta, welcomed its leaders and sold arms to them, but now realised that it was a filthy dictatorship after all, was swallowed without a burp. The fact that there were a mere 1,800 islanders, and that their way of life was preserved at the cost of 1,000 British casualties and 1,800 Argentinian ones did not seem a grossly stupid and expensive way of conducting foreign policy; it proved that freedom is indivisible, tyranny will be defeated, and the wishes of the loyal locals sovereign. Oh, and the fact that we're now trying to get rid of Gibraltar has absolutely nothing to do with the case.

The Falklands war was the making of Mrs Thatcher, and therefore has enduring consequences. But the episode of war itself has remained enclosed, separate, unreal, without consequence. Are the British any more attached to the islanders than they were before? Do we give the location a thought except as a place of battle and burial? Do we think of a future solution, or have we simply decided that there is no longer a problem? By the end of the 1980s, the estimated cost of the action and its aftermath had reached £2m an islander, but everyone seems to have stopped counting long ago.

Dr Johnson, seeking to prevent an earlier Falklands conflict, wrote: "It is wonderful with what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game." His truths persist. Television and football kept hovering round the edges of that distant war of 1982, and their values bled into it. Match of the Day with deaths? One of the first significant moves by the briefly regnant Argentinian governor of the Malvinas was to promise a free colour television set to every island home in time for the World Cup. (Transistor radios in exchange for vasectomy seemed to work, so why not tellies for sovereignty?) And do you remember who first brought news of the ceasefire to viewers on BBC1? Not Mrs Thatcher, not Ian McDonald, not Brian Hanrahan. No, it was David Coleman.